Alire

ALIRE: Ada LIbrary REpository

A catalog of ready-to-use Ada/SPARK libraries plus a command-line tool (alr) to obtain, build, and incorporate them into your own projects. It aims to fulfill a similar role to Rust’s cargo or OCaml’s opam.

Design principles

alr is tailored to userspace, in a similar way to Python’s virtualenv. A project or workspace will contain all its dependencies.

Some projects require binary packages from the distribution (Debian/Ubuntu’s apt, msys2’s pacman on Windows). In this case the user will be asked to authorize an installation through the distribution package manager.

Properties and dependencies of projects are managed through a TOML file. This file exists locally for working copies of projects, and the Alire community index stores the files corresponding to its projects.

The complete build environment is set up by setting the GPR_PROJECT_PATH environment variable before running gprbuild, thus freeing the user from concerns about installation paths. The user simply adds the used projects to its own project GPR file with their simple name.

Supported platforms

Alire requires a recent Ada 2012 compiler. In practice, this currently means GNAT Community or GNAT FSF 7.2 onward. The continuous integration checks are run against Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS, Windows and MacOS.

Tue Apr 13 00:29:34 UTC 2021